The Scenario
Annual rate review wrapped up last week. The finance team sent a spreadsheet with new hourly rates for 30 staff members across 8 projects. Effective the first of next month. Which is in four days.
You need to update both the workspace-level rate for each person and the project-level override rate where one exists. Clockify lets you set both independently. That means up to two API calls per person per project — potentially 60+ updates — and the finance spreadsheet isn't organized by person, it's organized by project, which is backwards from how Clockify's settings panel works.
Nobody in the company has the patience to click through 30 user profiles.
The bad version:
- Open Clockify's workspace settings, find the first user, update their workspace rate, save.
- Navigate to each of the 8 projects, find the user's project-level rate override, update it if it exists.
- Move to the next user. Repeat.
- Realize halfway through that you updated the wrong rate for one project because the user list in Clockify is sorted by first name but the finance spreadsheet is sorted by last name.
The rate review happens once a year. The data prep for this Clockify update shouldn't take longer than the review itself.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Google Sheet. It reads the rate card — users in column A, projects in column B, rates in column C — and applies each update to Clockify, confirming the result in column D.
For each row in this sheet, update the Clockify project-level hourly rate for the user in column A on the project in column B to the rate in column C — write 'updated' or error into column D.
What You Get
- One Clockify project-level rate update per row.
- "updated" written into column D for each success.
- Any row that fails — user not found, project not found, permission issue — gets an error description in column D.
- No guessing about which rows ran and which didn't: every row has a result.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
I also need to update workspace-level rates, not just project rates
After the project-level updates, column E has the new workspace rate for each user (some are the same across users, some differ).
After updating project-level rates from columns A, B, and C, also update the workspace-level hourly rate in Clockify for each unique user in column A using the rate in column E. Write the result into column F.
Some user names in the sheet don't exactly match Clockify
Finance formatted names as "Last, First" — Clockify uses "First Last."
Update Clockify project-level hourly rates from this sheet. For each user in column A (formatted as "Last, First"), find the matching Clockify user by reversing the name format. Write the matched Clockify user name into column E and the update result into column D.
I need to apply the same rate to all users on a given project
Three projects are getting a flat rate for all members — the rate is in column C, the project name is in column B, and column A is blank.
For rows where column A is blank, update the Clockify hourly rate for ALL users on the project in column B to the rate in column C. Write the number of users updated into column D.
Update rates, flag users not found, and summarize changes in one pass
Update all project-level rates from this sheet using columns A, B, and C. For any user in column A that can't be found in Clockify, write 'user not found' in column D and highlight the row in yellow. After all updates, write a summary — X updates successful, Y failed — into cell F1.
The rate review has a deadline. Wrapping the update logic and the audit trail into a single prompt means you're done in one run, not three.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Google Sheet where finance has dropped the new rate card, then ask it to apply all the Clockify rate updates in one pass. Also see: Build a Budget vs. Actual Hours Comparison in Google Sheets From Clockify and the Clockify integration overview.